Understanding Marx’s right-hand man
As second fiddles go, Friedrich Engels was the greatest. His lifetime collaborator was fellow German Karl Marx, who established the intellectual framework for communism. Engels worked closely with Marx on intellectual matters, but his most important role was as Marx’s financial supporter and most dogged defender.
British historian Tristram Hunt contends that Marx’s seminal critique of capitalism remains relevant, especially in our era of economic crisis, while the historical failures of communism have largely been blamed on Engels’s supposedly rigid misinterpretation of Marxism. Hunt calls this scapegoating of Engels unfair and utterly without historical basis, while offering readers a brilliant biography of the contradictory life of one genius who happily sacrificed for another.
Unlike Marx, Engels was born into money. His father was a rich industrialist in the textile business, who raised his son to be thrifty and religious. Engels would reject his father’s traditions and ideas but, of course, wanted the family money. Hunt grippingly explores the intellectual journey young Engels took as he moved away from Christianity, then toward the dialectics of Hegel, and toward his eventual partnership with Marx.
Hunt’s early chapters entertainingly portray the intellectually hungry Engels and his group of young friends spending their time drinking wine, carousing in Berlin cafes, endlessly discussing Hegel, while denouncing their parents (and spending parental money). After Engels finished his studies, his father sent him to the family-owned textile mill in Manchester, England, where he’d work for the next two decades. In Manchester, Engels moved from a theoretical understanding of capitalism’s problems to a profoundly visceral one, as he witnessed the horrid conditions of Manchester’s burgeoning working class.
The favored son of a family that directly profited from the exploitation of workers, Engels would nonetheless write about the crowded, filthy slums of industrial Manchester. His 1844 “The Condition of the Working Class in England’’ remains a classic description of Manchester’s horrors and a powerful denunciation of capitalist exploitation of workers. As Hunt makes clear, Engels’s beliefs would bring him a lifelong friendship with Karl Marx and lifelong conflict within his own family.
Hunt shows that Engels walked a tightrope with his father and his job managing a mill. The radical philosopher kept his mouth shut around his father, trying not to mention religion and politics, seeking to keep the money rolling in. Hunt sagely observes that “Engels’s lucrative income was the direct result of his exploitation of the labor power of the Manchester proletariat. The very evils that he and Marx had descried funded their lifestyle and philosophy.’’ Engels, then, took an “ends justify the means’’ stance, believing that the “dirty’’ money he sent to finance Marx’s life and work would ultimately lead to the destruction of capitalist exploitation.
Hunt vividly re-creates the Engels-Marx relationship, with Engels providing the financing and the editorial work on Marx’s writings, while also mercilessly attacking Marx’s intellectual foes. Marx comes across as something of a sponge, asking for money without much sensitivity to the epic difficulties Engels faced. Still, Engels would push Marx to produce the classic texts of Marxism, such as “Das Kapital.’’ Hunt shows that even after Marx’s death, Engels would be the most important disseminator of communist ideas.
Hunt’s biography is a terrific account of the 19th century intellectual climate that led to Marxism; it’s also a memorable depiction of Engels-era Manchester, but most of all it’s an insightful, important portrait of the most historically important friendship of the 19th century. Second fiddle Engels sacrificed everything to make Marx’s work possible. Hunt shows that Engels’s contradictory life is worth a great book in its own right.
Chuck Leddy is a freelance writer who lives in Dorchester. 
